21st-century Help Wanted Replies

So I’ve made more than enough happen with Economaney that it’s time to lard on some real execution capability (and attendant cost structure.) I have the entrepreneur’s gift of being able to see and create more opportunity than I can handle on my own, as well as a complete inability to manage detail, and those two things are how jobs and/or collaborations are born.

So I plunked down $25 for a Craigslist job post last Friday afternoon — highly descriptive, as is my wont, accurately poking fun at my weaknesses, which I’ve found is always effective in recruiting advertising, and very detailed as to what I’m looking for. Click here if you’d like to read it. And all of half a working day later, I’ve received more than a hundred replies.

I find that these replies are separating themselves into two categories very quickly: They’re either very impressively good or ridiculously bad. There’s not much middle ground. And the split, surprisingly, is about fifty-fifty.

On the good side, I am astonished — absolutely astonished — at the depth of people’s skill sets, experience, personal wit, clear personality, and raw desire to work on something meaningful. It’s frankly enormously encouraging for our collective economic future. These are responses from folks who read that long job post very carefully and took the time to craft very specific, very thoughtful, and often very funny responses. I wish I could hire them all.

And then on the bad side, half of the replies are a quick, easy “delete.” More than I care to count from individuals who expound on their extraordinary attention to detail (as the ad seeks), and then proceed to hit “send” with multiple spelling errors, failure to see some key part of the post, or simply with a blind, un-customized reply to this most customized of postings. These people, in my opinion, are going to be populating the refugee camps of the Economic Revolution — there’s no way they can provide for themselves given where we’re going.

Overall, I’m left with this Tale of Two Cities feeling for the future. It’s the best of times because we’ve got a huge amount of gas in our tank in the form of these remarkably interesting, creative, ambitious people, and the worst of times because our train’s going to be loaded down with a whole lot of the brain-dead. You can’t fight this revolution with concrete between your ears.

Gotta get back at it. No telling what I can do with a couple people from the first group on my team.